Code.Org Short Film With Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, and Chris Bosh Gets Over 12 Million Views, Tops YouTube List

Education non-profit debuts short film citing leaders from all walks of life saying more students should learn to code.

SEATTLE, March 12, 2013 - Code.org, a non-profit focused on computer programming education, launched two weeks ago with a short film starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat, and others. The film, featured at www.Code.org, generated a tremendous response and has been viewed over 12 million times in the two weeks since its release. Additionally, in the first 48 hours after it was available, the film topped YouTube’s “most popular” chart.

In addition to the strong number of film views, Code.org received staggering support from the community:

Over 550,000 online petitions signed indicating support for more computer programming classes across the country

More than 9,500 schools indicating they want more Computer Programming courses at their school

Over 21,000 engineers volunteering to teach Computer Programming in their communities

The support for the film indicates how this topic touches all industries and is of interest to students, educators, engineers, and professionals alike. Code.org co-founder, Hadi Partovi, said, “With only 4,000 computer programming classes currently being offered across the US, imagine the possibilities Code.org has if it can connect those people volunteering to teach Computer Programming with those who described a desire for more courses in their schools – we could start to solve this issue sooner than we thought possible. This will be our next challenge as a foundation and we’re excited to move forward.”

The Code.org short film has been distributed to many organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers, National Science Teachers Association, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Teach For America, The College Board, DonorsChoose, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Association for Computation Machinery, and many others. These organizations have in turn distributed the film to teachers to play in classrooms across the country. We expect the film to reach over 500,000 teachers whose classrooms reach over 10 million students. The support from these groups reinforces the message that more students should be learning to code — regardless of the career they wish to pursue.

Directed by Lesley Chilcott, (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman), the Code.org short film is meant to motivate students to learn computer programming.

Code.org is a public 501c3 non-profit. Founded by twins Ali and Hadi Partovi, Code.org’s vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code. http://code.org